So last night before we went in to finish clearing Karazhan (Illhoof – Nightbane), I decided I wanted to try out a little more +hit to see what kind of noticeable difference it would have in my threat generation and DPS. I swapped out my normal [item]Solid Star of Elune[/item] on my [item]Gyro-Balanced Khorium Destroyer[/item] for a [item]Rigid Dawnstone[/item]. By putting in the yellow gem, I get the +3 STA socket bonus so it cost me 90 hp for +8 hit raiting.

At the end of the night I ran my WWS parser and compared my logs. I saw a 1% decrease in my normal melee miss rate, which was nice and expected. What I wasn’t really expecting was a significant reduction in my miss rate on my specials. Heroic Strike, Shield Slam and Revenge all had their miss rate dropped by about 4%! This was huge! In addition, I had a noticeable increase in my overall DPS, which directly translates into added rage, and added threat!

I knew that adding hit rating would help, but even I have been underestimating the value! From what I saw last night, I will looking for more gems that I can swap out for added +hit that will hopefully not lower my health by too much. I have some def/sta gems that I can likely swap and might even manage to grab some socket bonuses from re-gemming existing gear. I am going to shoot for around +5% hit which will require around 80 hit rating. The gains from adding the +hit is that it will generate more threat which will allow your DPSers to open up even more and get those boss mobs down quicker

While browsing various blogs today, I noticed mention that more bag/storage space may be coming! For warriors, this is great news as we often find ourselves carrying around several sets of gear so we can be prepared for any situation!

Drysc was quoted as saying:

We’re mindful of space concerns, and increasing the base backpack size is certainly a possibility for the future. We have other space and storage increases currently in the works for release before Wrath though, and we’ll be talking about those soon?.

Notice that he says BEFORE Wrath! Hrm, I wonder what they could be up to?

Taken from www.wrathofthelichking.com

So you’ve been running heroics for a while now, maybe Heroic Mechanar for your [item]The Sun Eater[/item], and in the meantime, you’ve been collecting those [item]Badge of Justice[/item]. So what do you spend them on? As a warrior tank, you have a few options:

My Suggestion

My suggestion is to get the [item]Gnomeregan Auto-Blocker 600[/item] first. This is an amazing trinket for both threat as well as mitigation with the added shield block. When you need more avoidance, swap in [item]Moroes’ Lucky Pocket Watch[/item] (from Moroes) on boss mobs.

Of course there is also the Epic Fire Resist gear that can be bought here, but you won’t need this level of Fire Resist gear until well into end raid content. There is also a good amount of DPS style gear available for Badges if you want to flesh out your DPS set

Karthis is a feral druid who writes about druid tanking in his blog, Of Teeth and Claws. He has written an article factoring in rage as it pertains to threat.

He quotes from WoWBlues:

Gaining Power (Mana / Energy / Rage) also causes threat in most cases, for example taking a healing potion, or gaining rage from Bloodrage, or Energy from Thistle Tea.

[...]

For normal abilities, each point of Mana is 0.5 threat, Rage is 5 threat, and Energy is unknown, probably 5.

[...]

These forms of buffs all have infinite range; they will cause threat to all mobs on whose threat list you are on. Furthermore, the threat caused is split equally among all the affected mobs.

[...]

Note that threat caused from Power Gain is not affected by threat modifiers. Gaining 1 point of Rage will give 5 threat whether you are in Battle Stance or Defensive Stance.

For me, this is particularly interesting as my typical pre-pull setup is to Berserker Stance -> Berserker Rage -> Defensive Stance -> Bloodrage -> Pull

What this means is that I could actually generate more rage by doing the Pull BEFORE I hit Bloodrage. Doing so would help generate a bit more threat on the initial pull